The Conversation-Coppola

The typical film narrative occurs in one of three primary modes. The first occurs when the director narrates the story omnisciently, moving from character to character and event to event wherein the viewer has access to all the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of the characters. The second form of narration is a third person perspective where one central character is followed. Viewers receive their perspective solely from this sentient character; we only know the story from his perceptions. The third form of narrative occurs when the events are revealed to us solely in first person form, where the story is revealed to us solely from the perspective of only one character.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, we see experimentation with the narrative form. In this film the camera and sound are used to pull the viewer into the story, to make him or her a part of the action, moods, and feelings of the story. When The Conversation was released, many critics noted that certain aspects of it, including narration, owed homage to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s films also used experimental narrative techniques. If we review Hitchcock’s description of the experimental technique he used for his own film, Sabotage, we see many similarities to the narrative technique he employed and the one used by Coppola in The Conversation:

You gradually build up the psychological situation, piece by piece, usin

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r to add to the themes of surveillance, lack of privacy and voyeurism involved. We see this when Harry returns to his apartment. He is a loner who does not like his privacy invaded, though he performs that job daily where other people are concerned. He becomes upset when he learns his landlady used her key to his apartment to leave him a birthday present. However, when Harry enters his apartment the camera does not follow his movements as with typical narrative use of the camera. Instead, much like a video surveillance camera it pans left and right, eventually showing us his position in the couch. Like Harry’s job duties, we become a vicarious observer of the characters and action to the point where we wonder about our own right to pry into the lives of others, something, as Iain Lang (1) points out in his review of the film, Harry will come to see as a moral dilemma “The film’s main thrust is a moral one: to what extent does someone have the right to submit to anyone else’s actions to observation and subsequent judgement? This message is frighteningly underlined by a switch in Caul’s position from observer to observed, which extends back to and questions one’s own position as vicarious viewer of the film.” The eventual
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1711
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)